Bienvenidos a Buenos Aires

It's Monday night after my first full day in Argentina. I'm not necessarily in love but, to quote a friend on the program, I am already "deeply infatuated" with this city.

Yes, I am a total sucker for murals. This one tells the history of the slaughterhouse district; here a paperboy celebrates the victory of a renowned local boxer.

I woke from too little sleep to not care and find energy in adrenaline instead. After a long but fascinating morning getting our intro to Buenos Aires (safety, history, money advice; "No matter what you are talking about in this country, you are talking about Peron"; "If you're an intellectual in this country then you don't go to the discotequa"; "Get used to traveling like a sardine on the subway") we emerged for a leisurely lunch and a long walk downtown.

All the reverse culture shock we might have expected from the end of IHP and a return to the USA seems to have hit us here in Argentina instead. Things feel suddenly, radically, surprisingly familiar and comfortable: ample sidewalks to walk on. Tall buildings with the top stories shaped like overgrown staircases so as to not block out sunlight on the street (just like in New York). A clearly planned grid; Western clothes everywhere; McDonalds and Starbucks and a store called Clandestine that seems like an Argentinian version of Claire's but for slightly older women. And since I'm lucky enough to actually speak the language of the people who live here, existing in this city feels so easy that it's a little jarring - I'd really started to get used to not knowing how to talk to anybody, to assuming I know nothing about the meaning behind particular clothes and gestures, to learning by making sense of what seems like chaos initially.

But I also keep thinking of an extremely pretentious but also very well-put phrase that a guest lecturer from Harvard once said at Yale: that the purpose of history is "to normalize the exotic, and exoticize the quotidian." In other words, learning about the world at once makes you realize that what you had once assumed to be strange or confusing or Other to you is actually quite understandable - and simultaneously makes you understand that things you take for granted, assume are normal, or think of as inevitable, really have extremely complex stories of their own that you never knew about. IHP does that, relentlessly and beautifully, and I'll bet that my time in Buenos Aires will be no different. Just maybe more on the "exoticize the quotidian" side of things.

Quotidian to be exoticized?

Exoticism to be normalized?

Buenos Aires has so many of the things I have enjoyed and found excitement in about New York and Chicago - the walkability, the endless visual stimuli, the hidden architectural surprises, the masses of humanity, the food to eat as you walk, the accessibility of opportunities for intellectual stimulus with museums and bookstores and the like - and it also happens to be in Spanish, which is sort of the perfect combination for me. Here are a few photos to show you why I'm starting to feel infatuated:

SO MANY BOOKSTORES

AND SO MANY CHURROS

Traditional "scratching" protest tactic - throw paint balls at a building to "scratch" it and reveal the corruption of the building's owner. Started after the Dirty War.

"Our homeland is not a business," more or less

Ongoing protest about government response to the floods. A lot of protests here...

New bike lanes

After the walk we retired to our home-stays, and mine is ridiculous and wonderful. This husband and wife (parents of three, and grandparents of seven) used to run an artisan/household materials store out of their huge home not far from the heart of Buenos Aires. With imports from China hurting their business in the 1990's, they closed down shop and started looking for something else to do. When a friend mentioned to them a growing number of study abroad programs in Buenos Aires in perpetual need of good home-stays (and willing to pay decent money for them too), they decided to make use of their huge house and opened it up for guests in 1995. 18 years later, they have yet to look back and - except for the two months they take off each year to travel the world - generally have about ten study abroad students staying in their house at any given time, their hijos adoptivos.

El Ateneo, South America's largest bookstore - housed in an old theater

Now is no exception, and we three IHP boys joined up with seven more students for what looks to be four weeks with a very caring and relaxed family. Domestic wine is served with each huge dinner; our host dad throws us peeled bananas for desert from as far back as he can go in the kitchen; we have a key to the house in case we join the crowds and stay out dancing until seven in the morning, but we also feel comfortable staying at home and - though he will allegedly make fun of us for not taking advantage of the chance to party - hearing all his amazing stories and political musings.

How this infatuation is problematic or complicated or other things can like that can wait; for now, Buenos Aires, mucho gusto conocerte.

Beef is king in Argentina...

 

Cool Photos

Woops! I haven't taken many pictures of written many blog posts from Senegal - and the ones that I have written have been almost more about ideas than actual stories (especially that rant on my last post...).

This blog needs more stories, and I'll try to remember that in Argentina. But to make up for it (at least a little bit), here are some cool photos to look at. A picture's worth a thousand words and you can probably tell a story using just as many, right?

Obama ice cream!

 

Eating Obama ice cream

 

Very cool very expensive monument that caused protests when it went up

 

Beautiful pirogue fishing boats

 

Learning to wrestle

 

Learning the hard way

 

Village Visit

I signed up for IHP in part because I knew that I knew nothing about cities (I still do, but at least now I have a better sense of what it is that I don't know). Up until now, I've had a lot of opportunities to travel, but I have mostly only gone to rural places - communities in Mexico, Panama, and Nicaragua. While in Senegal I got to visit a village there, and it was an incredibly fun and full two nights. We danced, watched a wrestling match, learned to grind millet and built mud bricks for houses, cooked, ate, took bucket baths, held lots of interviews, and ate massive amounts of food from our warm and thoughtful hosts.

Let's do a little compare and contrast:

Part of me felt immediately at home. The mothers asking you to eat more and more and more food (and beaming like the sun if you do); the children eagerly wanting to wrestle and play Simon Says and crowd around you to see your camera after you take a photo; the availability of chickens to clean up any scraps of food left lying around; the feeling of calm that comes from there being little to no light after the sun goes down - and the spectacular views of the stars overhead when it does; the unspoken expectations that in a community if somebody is struggling then someone else will be there to help, and that if you schedule something for 2:00 really things will start rolling around 3:00 or 4:00 - all of these stood as vivid reminders of what it felt like to be an American visiting rural communities all over Central America.

The compound where I stayed - sorry these are just buildings not people! I still don't feel comfortable posting photos of people on my blog without them knowing about it... Note how all the doors face towards each other so when you leave your house, you're immediately greeted by the family members who live next door.

But part of me was also feeling a disconnect, a sense that my surroundings were mysteriously unfamiliar and not at all like what I was used to seeing either in the country where I was born, or in the other places where I've spent enough time to get more or less comfortable. Everything was in Wolof, not Spanish, and the language barrier was intense. Many families were polygamous. There was sand and not dirt; it was flat and not hilly; I was there during the dry season, without the reliable three hours of downpour that come each afternoon during the rainy months in Central America. Thirty-seven friends that I already knew were there with me. And everybody knew we were only there for a few nights, there with only the goals to study and to learn.

I believe that there is something universally beautiful about a community of people that think of themselves as a community, and that have continuity in that community for generations and generations.

I believe that there is something universally inspiring about how resilient, strong, and creative humans are capable of being when living with not many material resources, and lots of uncertainty.

I believe that it's an amazing privilege to get to witness things that are so beautiful and inspiring.

Center of the village

But other than that, I'm not sure what I believe. I have lots of thoughts about lots of questions after visiting lots of places around the world, but they're still not coherent enough for me to feel comfortable publishing them online just yet. There are a few thoughts floating around in my head, though, that I think should go online:

People back home can be quick to tell anybody who does volunteer work outside of Western Europe or the northern part of North America that they are amazing for going out there and solving poverty in poor, rural parts of poor, developing countries. This glosses over so many complicated questions about the definition of "poverty"; about variety across different continents and countries and regions and towns and human beings; about similar work being done in countries with higher GDP's; about what different "volunteer" or "development" projects really do and why - way too much complexity to bother writing about right now.

But I think that the tendency in the States to gloss over all that complexity can lead us to almost assume that anybody from a country with a high GDP who even spends time in a country with a low GDP is somehow saintly - that we, for example, are contributing to a fight against global poverty by just showing up in this village for two nights. I don't think that's right...

...I do think that as many people as possible should have the chance to go visit a place that they think of poor, rural, and developing so that they can make connections with actual human beings and realize the limits of what they know about their lives; realize the limits of labeling a place with those words; realize that now they have connections with actual human beings in one village of one country of one continent, which cannot speak for the actual human beings who live in thousands of other villages around the world.

I am aware that when I come back to the United States, many people that I talk to about IHP will expect me to speak for all of Africa. I cannot do that. I can speak about my experience for a limited amount of time with one family in Dakar, with one community near Toubacouta - and this is more powerful because it is more realistic.

...And I'm also starting to think that our "you-must-be-fighting-poverty-oh-good-for-you" tendency has something to do with the focus of our news media in Africa. Rarely in any news story published in the United States about anything happening in Africa, does the author do any work to distinguish the location he or she is writing about from all the rest of Africa. This encourages us to fall into the cliched trap of thinking of the entire continent as one country.

And a huge proportion of those news stories cover three topics: AIDS, female genital mutilation, and starvation. Three clearly bad things that now make us fall into the trap of thinking of the entire continent of Africa as one country where everything everywhere is going horribly wrong.

Well, as it turns out, AIDS and female circumcisions and starvation do not figure into the daily realities of the vast majority of people living in Dakar, and in the village that we visited. Surprising as this may sound, most people I have met here actually do not go around all day filled with a crushing fear about how everything everywhere is going horribly wrong.

The world's a really big, really complicated place. Think of it as a massive pile of unorganized data, and not all the data is of the same kind. We go and live our lives and collect bits and pieces of this data all the time. It is up to us to find matrices to contain that data as well as we can, to acknowledge that no matrix will ever be able to contain all of it but that we still need to always look for a better and better matrix. As I try to do that (as maybe you do, too) I want to always remember that sometimes we already have matrices in our heads and we don't even know it, and sometimes those matrices might be really limiting and skewed ones...like the ones constructed by media sources that describe all of Africa as one country where everything everwhere is going horribly wrong.

 

Goree Island

We visited Goree island this week; it's a major site for tourists in Senegal.

Here's a photo of the picturesque island, complete with sunshine and swimmers:

Here's a nice photo of Dakar and its skyline that I took from the island:

And here's a picture of the hole that was used as a punishment cell, into which soldiers would shove twenty or more men and women if and when they ever "misbehaved" at the Goree Island prison:

Occupying the Westernmost tip of the African continent, what is now the country of Senegal has the dubious accolade of being one of the largest sites for the "export" of captured Africans as slaves to the New World. Goree Island was where captured Senegalese people would wait for the ships that would take them there.

We toured the island with IHP, and the experience was pretty surreal. Middle school students on field trips, masses of tourists - mostly French - and a celebrity visit from one of Senegal's most prominent wrestlers combined on a small, beautiful, highly commercialized site.

The stories that our guide told us were (almost needless to say) horrifying and sobering and depressing and confusing. We talk about the slave trade in American high school classes, but never about the side of it that took place in Africa. Standing where so many people had on their way to a life of slavery; hearing the statistics rattled off one after another; acknowledging quite how oblivious I am to the vast majority of Senegalese history (and African history in general), to what losing millions of people does to a place, to what tribes pitted against each other does to a society - it was a lot to take in. Here are a few more photos that might give you a sense of the place:

Our guide's silhouette

One of the cells

French for "children"

The first of those three pictures reminded me of an idea from the last Batman movie - how true hell is only possible when you can glimpse a shimmer of light, have a shimmer of false hope. Slits in the walls helped guards survey the captives more efficiently; they must have also allowed just a hint of daylight and familiarity to creep into the hellish, crowded prisons. I can only imagine this served to make the contrast feel even more real and horrible.

They say Mandela visited this site when he came to Senegal, and he entered the punishment cell alone. After twenty minutes, reminded of the years he had spent in prison, feeling the history first-hand, he emerged in tears.

One of my classmates is studying "doors" for his independent research project in India, Senegal, and Argentina. He analyzed the gate of Goree Island for us: it's a one-way door, not so much a door even as it is a passage whose presence was intended to symbolize that for those who walked through it, there would be no return.

----

You might have noticed that I'm sounding a little vague about the details of Goree's history, and my own emotions about it; I'm even starting to use more poetic language that might sound less personal. That's because I'm still struggling to get past thinking about Goree's tone.

As I mentioned, it's a top tourist attraction. Our guide was friendly and energetic, sharing statistics of horrors with a tone that probably would have been more appropriate at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C.

It seemed as though this was a place where tourists could pay an entry fee to feel bad about themselves (and the ways their predecessors may have profited from this history), but only in order to later feel good about themselves for having gone to such an "enriching," "important," "educational" site - and doubly good for having supported the local community after their tour, by buying one of the tacky t-shirts or earrings that are sold from stalls around the island.

It's an ironic combiation - sobering history and contemporary consumerist cheerfulness - and I still don't know what to make of it. Is this an essential site for everyone around the world to see? That's certainly what I was thinking at first, as I snapped as many photos as possible to share with people on this blog.

Was the information that I learned there reliable, and if other people in Senegal have told me contradictory stories about the place, then why is it that I feel a greater sense of queasiness to question the historical accuracy of this site, as opposed to any other?

Why do I reflect so much on how I interacted with this site, on what it meant to me personally - can this be attributed to maturity or narcissism? Self-awareness or supremely missing the point?

Are my assumptions about how other tourists interact with this site founded? And what if they're not? And on IHP do we fancy ourselves triply good for doing all the things the other tourists are doing...but with more analysis after the fact?

And should it be depressing, or inspiring, or confusing, or what to see how local residents have turned this island into a highly profitable enterprise?

And how did this history ever happen?

And why do we talk about the past as though it were a parallel universe?

And if this blog post - or my earlier one on the dump in India - makes a reader feel pity, then what do I think of that?

I think I'm starting to understand more of what they mean when they say that IHP doesn't lead to many answers, but it does lead to more questions.

 

Spangolofrenglish

We'll be spending four weeks living with host families in Dakar. I can already tell that mine is likely to make for a fascinating and fun experience...

My seven-year-old host sister is trying to teach me words in the Wolof tribal language but she only speaks French so she has to ask her aunt for help.

Sometimes I can understand her aunt because what she says sounds like the (very limited) Haitian Creole that I learned last semester; sometimes she can understand me when I try to speak to her in Spanish because she grew up with a creolized form of Portuguese spoken in her grandmother's country, Cape Verte.

But if all else fails, then I can turn to my host dad and ask him to translate with the English that he knows, or turn to my host mom with Spanish because she studied it in school. The latter is especially helpful when my words then get translated into Serer, the tribal language of the maid who stays here during the week.

There are technically seven languages going on here (eight, if you count the Italian than an uncle throws in to try to understand my Spanish), but four of them are the most dominant: Spanish, Wolof, French, and English. Or as we like to say on IHP, Spangolofrenglish.

I came here on a mission to be able to hold a conversation in Wolof after five weeks. This was the dominant language, I had heard, and it would be a fun challenge to throw myself in off the deep end and try to master a new language in a month - before departing for the comfortable Spanish of Argentina. But the reality of Dakar's linguistic complexities is making me chill out with that particular ambition, and work with seven languages simultaneously instead.

Dakar makes it easy enough to chill out. It's always in the 70's or 80's here, and during the dry season there's almost never a cloud in the sky. The city rests on a peninsula so the scent of the sea and the cool breeze it creates always surround you. And everything is bright - bright from the long, sunny days; bright from the white sand that covers every inch of unpaved city; bright from the buildings painted either white or pastel.

So it's a nice place to be, and an interesting one too: French colonization, a deeply tribal history, rapid urbanization, a long history of migration from nearby African countries, constant European tourism, and a proliferation of American study abroad programs are all apparent, even in just one conversation around the dinner table.

I don't have any photos of Spangolofrenglish so here are some other photos of things to look forward to in the coming weeks instead:

The gorgeous, hand-painted pirogue shipping boats of Dakar

Seth learning to grind millet

Seth mastering the clap in between smashes of millet

Seth feeling more humble about his clapping skills